Historical precedent

As the United States gallops ahead in its desire to socialize everything (healthcare and education, especially), the details of an efficiently run state system always gum up the works. When the computers don’t work in your doctor’s office, your physician can’t use his/her stethoscope.

President Obama repeatedly delays implementation of the most vexing Obamacare provisions, the ones that he believes can’t work on time. And, in the sphere of education, the PARCC tests that all public school children take are being fudged and delayed because bureaucrats can’t settle on how the test should be scored — what the bureaucrats are calling “the thresholds.”

Isn’t it great that whenever government wants to do something completely new it uses the oldest terminology it can find: rubrics, benchmarks, and now “thresholds?” Why the delay? Simply put, the government doesn’t want to admit how badly our students perform in the global marketplace of talent.

President Obama wants America to be more like every other country. With our low expectations and the corroding effects of government-run testing, Obama is bound to get his fondest desire. America is following an historical precedent. The Chinese stunted their economic and political growth for a thousand years when its Mandarins demanded that testing control everything. Congratulations to us. We have chosen to follow a pattern of improvement that crippled China for 10 centuries. But don’t worry, that won’t happen here.